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Vin slips through Elend's dark room and stands over him asleep. OreSeur has just told her — apologetically — what Elend did while she slept off her wounds: rode alone into the koloss camp. She cannot protect him. For all her pewter and her atium and her years on the street, she cannot keep one man safe. Her hands shake. Then Zane is in the room, on the balcony with the mist falling around him, telling her that Captain Demoux was the inside man — that he had been bribed by Cett to bring Straff's army down on the Assembly during the vote, sealing both Elend's and Penrod's deaths and the chamber to Cett as the sole survivor.

Vin half-believes it. She had recognised Hasting men among the assassins. The frustration boils up out of her: another tyrant, a hostile army outside, a third army of monsters no one understands, and an Elend she cannot keep safe. Zane tells her they cannot just kill Cett; they have to break his army so badly that whoever inherits it runs. He asks what Kelsier would say. The answer is obvious. She takes the bead of atium back from OreSeur, who quietly tells her not to do this, and follows Zane out into the night.

A young Cett soldier named Wellen stands mist duty on the outer wall of Keep Hasting beside his friend Jarloux. Wellen has always quietly believed there is something out in the mists; soldiers laugh at it. Then a hail of coins like a wall of arrows sweeps the entire forty-man section of wall in a single second; Jarloux drops with a coin through his mouth; two black shapes whip overhead and are gone over the parapet without slowing, and Wellen is the only living thing left in his section of the wall.

Vin and Zane hit the courtyard side by side. With paired pewter they share a single coin between them, Pushing in opposite directions to fling the Cett soldiers around them apart by the metal of their armour and weapons. They slam through the keep doors using a single corpse for a battering ram, and inside the lower hall meet fifty hazekillers — staves, wooden shields, obsidian — picked and trained against Allomancers. Vin cuts through her ten in seconds and is barely breathing; Zane takes his with atium burning. The keep's lift shaft becomes their stairs. She takes the third floor, Zane the second.

The third floor is the dining chamber where she and Elend once ate with Cett. Cett's men come at her from two doors, fifty at a time. She lets them ring her, drops to a crouch, burns duralumin on a single iron Pull, and tears every stained-glass window in the round chamber inward at once — twisting metal frames and a sleet of coloured glass through the front rank of attackers. Then duralumin and steel in a single Push, and she throws the dead and the dying out the windows opposite her, sweeping the rest of the room out into the mist. The chamber is empty.

On the fifth floor she crashes through a wooden door behind a wave of broken lamp-oil and fire and finds Cett in a single wooden chair, unarmed, in clothes that were not even straightened. His son Gneorndin is in front of him with a duelling cane. The boy swings; she brushes him aside; she throws Cett across the room and tells him to fight her. He cannot. He is tired. She hits him until he bleeds. Gneorndin gets back up and puts himself between them again, openly weeping, holding the cane in a hand that cannot keep still. Something in her notices her own tears on her own face. She looks at the man she came to kill and asks where his Mistborn is. There never was one. The Allomancers in the Assembly attack — and the Mistings sent against her months ago, when Zane first saved her — were every one he had ever owned. He came to Luthadel because Straff would have come for him eventually, and the only chance he had been able to think of was to kill her early.

The back wall of the chamber explodes inward. Zane is in the next room, bleeding from a dozen cuts that are clearly not his — atium leaking from his fingertips instead of injuries — with the hazekiller dead at his feet. He steps over the broken boards toward Cett. She dives at him; he sidesteps her with the unearthly grace of an atium burner. She asks him please. He looks at her with something like grief, says the king still owns her and that he had hoped she could be free of him by the end of the night, and walks back out through the broken wall. Vin follows in his wake. Cett is alive. His army is broken. The keep is on fire behind her.